The easy way to get, use and share data

Culture Grid

About

From the website:

The Culture Grid is designed to do two things. Firstly, it pulls together information from the thousands of museum, archive and library websites and databases. Secondly, it serves this information up to media partners such as Google and the BBC to ensure that it is available to as wide an audience as possible.

Culture Grid aggregates content from a growing variety of cultural institutions. Current contributors are listed on the detailed search page :
http://culturegrid.org.uk/discover/advanced. Some specific sub-collections available via culture-grid are:

Access

The Culture Grid content is best thought of, like most repositories, as a constantly expanding stream of content rather than something that is versioned in discrete chunks. Access is via the OAIPMH protocol which can be used to download the full set of culture grid records, and to obtain change-sets of records updated since the last OAI harvest.

Openness

Content is aggregated and preserved from a number of host organisations and services and made public by the grid. Culture-Grid itself acts as a referetory and is trying to clarify licensing with each data provider. Generally, the metadata is freely available although the content the metadata points back to will be licensed differently. Each individual metadata record has a license property. By default CG Content is licensed CC-nc-nd license, but users should check on a per record basis. It is possible to filter searches by license (dcterms.license). For OAI, developers would need to check license by license. Use of OAI to gather updates would alert harvesters to re-licensed records.

The Copyright statement on the site most likely refers to the site content rather than the culture grid content.